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I have Windows 7 home premium OEM on Dell desktop purchased new 5 years ago. No problems until hard drive started failing last week. I bought a new drive and restored from WindowsImageBackup taken earlier this year. Started getting "Windows is not genuine" when I connected to internet (0x8004fe21) at bottom. Everything still works, but popup reappears every few hours. Downloaded and ran WindowsActivationUpdate as suggested. Got error 0xC8000247 trying to install. Reviewed forums and called Microsoft (via slui 4 number). After finally getting to human and explaining situation, they took the product codes and ids and after 15 minutes came back to say they couldn't help. I would have to reinstall from a Windows disk (which I don't have since OEM from Dell). They then said I would have to call Dell for support. I don't want to reinstall. The whole point of the image backup was to recover from hardware errors without having to reinstall everything Can you help?

I noticed the File Mismatch and Tampered File in other posts, but am not sure which suggestions are appropriate. If this helps, here are some registry queries requested in a previous Tampered File post:

If KB3004394 is installed, uninstall it, and reboot twice.Do a Check for Updates, and install the new version of KB3004394, and any other updates.reboot again, and run a new MGADiag report, and post it.

If KB3004394 is not installed, or the above doesn't fix it...

This may simply be caused by a bad set of Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers -

PSU n/a Hard Drives 750GB Seagate internal
Sundry external drives attached to other computers on the local network
1TB on the Lenovo Internet Speed as much as I can get - usually on a dongle, so <1Mb/s Antivirus MSE Browser IE11/Chrome/FF(if I must)

Okay, KB3004394 is not installed and I already downloaded the RST drivers based on seeing this advice in other threads, but I'm always a little reluctant to make changes without understanding them, and I don't use RAID drives. Do you mind explaining why this fixes the problem, and why that version from 2012? Am I trying to get WindowsActivationUpdate to work so that it can update the Microsoft activation databases with the new hard drive serial number? I understand you're doing this to be helpful (I see all your other posts), and I can't thank you enough already.

In any case, here's the new MGADiag. There are no longer any File Mismatch or Tampered File lines.

PSU n/a Hard Drives 750GB Seagate internal
Sundry external drives attached to other computers on the local network
1TB on the Lenovo Internet Speed as much as I can get - usually on a dongle, so <1Mb/s Antivirus MSE Browser IE11/Chrome/FF(if I must)

Its been two days and no more "not genuine" popups, so it appears to be fixed. I did not have to install WindowsActivationUpdate. I had seen the Intel RST driver advice on other threads but did not think it applied since I do not use RAID, but the driver applies to AHCI mode as well.

If anyone with a similar problem is interested, before installing the new RST driver on my system, Device Manager reported version 8.9.0.1023 for "Intel(R) ICH10R SATA AHCI Controller" under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. That is apparantly a bad version. The new driver is version 11.7.0.1013.

PSU n/a Hard Drives 750GB Seagate internal
Sundry external drives attached to other computers on the local network
1TB on the Lenovo Internet Speed as much as I can get - usually on a dongle, so <1Mb/s Antivirus MSE Browser IE11/Chrome/FF(if I must)

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